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Return to the Dust: A Book Review

20 April 2006

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
Scribner, 1996

A decade has passed since Frank McCourt became a literary giant for his first memoir, Angela’s Ashes, an account of his impoverished boyhood in Brooklyn and Limerick, Ireland, that won a 1997 Pulitzer Prize. McCourt, now 76, has been publishing again, completing last November a biographical trilogy that wound through 1999’s immigrant tale ‘Tis and landed with the story of McCourt’s 30 plus years as a schoolteacher in and around New York City, Teacher Man. If McCourt’s success from his first two memoirs is to be repeated, Teacher Man will surely be a runaway bestseller; or maybe, in just five months, it has already been. It has certainly been much talked about, reviewed by everybody, Publisher’s Weekly going so far as to say that it should be “mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn’t hurt some politicians to read it, too,” whatever that latter comment means. At such a time, 10 years since the world first recognized McCourt’s considerable talents and while those talents are being actively talked about, the moment has arrived to take stock of the story that first brought McCourt to fame and consider the legacy upon which the Limerick Teacher Man continues to build.

Angela’s Ashes is, on the narrative level, a story of grim tragedies. Told from the first person and in present tense, the memoir follows McCourt’s father, Malachy, as he escapes Ireland after taking a rap as an IRA member. Landing in Depression-era Brooklyn, he shows what seem to be his true colors – an obsessive drinker, chronically unemployed, even by the Depression’s standards – and indeed, in Angela’s Ashes, those two traits would become the gateposts of Malachy’s tragic life. But in Brooklyn, Malachy also meets Angela Sheehan, whom he is forced to marry after a late night tryst puts the woman in “an interesting condition.” Three babies and no jobs later, the family, grieving the loss of infant Margaret, is sent back to Ireland to Angela’s childhood home, where life does not get much better. If anything, it gets worse: Frank, the oldest child, grows up in a series of rundown apartments, all infested with lice and fleas, some persistently flooded due to Limerick’s persistent rains, and one featuring the pungent, noisome aroma of the nearby latrine, which services the entire lane. Frank’s family, growing to include four more children, though only two survive, often share mattresses left behind during the potato famine, while his mother is forced to beg for shoes and charity throughout the city. Frank, meanwhile, receives a Catholic education – complete with strong lashings – and begins to earn a living as a messenger boy, novice writer, and clerk, before he saves up just enough to buy a ticket back to America, where this act in McCourt’s life ends, looking over the lights in New York State, a shipmate saying, “This is a grand country, isn’t it?,” and McCourt responding with the single word, “‘Tis.”

Already, the literary traditions upon which McCourt draws for Angela’s Ashes are becoming clear. Many critics, reviewing the book when it was published in 1996, rested heavily on a fastidious word: Dickensian (“That’s a holy terror of a word,” as the woman young Frank McCourt writes threatening letters for in Limerick, Mrs. Finucane, says, “What does it mean?”). “Dickensian poverty.” “Dickensian tragedy,” “Dickensian dialogue.” While there is a certain atmosphere of poverty in Angela’s Ashes reminiscent of Dickens – a grime that seems to cover every surface, since, given McCourt’s account, grime certainly must have been covering every surface – the evocation of Dickens here is somewhat heavy-handed. Dickens was a master serialist, after all, and often his exacting and beautiful descriptions of poverty or of life on England’s gritty streets were as much about filling the page with words as they were about being meaningful; this is not to say Dickens’ words were not also filled with meaning, only that he occasionally took his time getting there. Angela’s Ashes has also been intermittently criticized for its garrulousness, but McCourt’s style is ultimately direct and unencumbered, as in his summary of the life story he is about to tell in his book’s first pages: “The poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.” Little doubt exists in the pages of Angela’s Ashes as to the terrible color and tenor of McCourt’s family’s life. Little does McCourt do to hide or compromise events or settings. It is merely his intonation that seems to run long. But McCourt displays such genius for scene setting and dialogue in Angela’s Ashes that every word feels important, as if these stories could only be told with his sense of flourish. In this way, Angela’s Ashes is less a resurrection of Dickens than of James Joyce, whose plays with dialogue in the story of his own Irish childhood, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are paralleled – perhaps unconsciously – by McCourt.

In the end, though, Angela’s Ashes seems an entirely original tale of an Irish life, which may account for the book’s success then and its author’s success now. Where previous Irish childhood stories like Joyce’s Portrait have mostly hinged upon the bleak, irreconcilable drudge of a doomed life, McCourt’s story is hopeful, energetic, proud, unimposing, and funny. Even in squalid conditions, even in the most tragic of circumstances, including several dying siblings and a father who drinks away the family’s charity money before disappearing to England, young Frank McCourt is a redeeming figure, looking ahead. As a result, Angela’s Ashes’ underlying emotion is joy, which ironically, makes the story feel un-Irish. Gail Caldwell, literary critic for the Boston Globe, who was faced with the unenviable task of reviewing an Irish boyhood story for that most Irish of American cities, made such a nationalistic point in her 1996 review of McCourt’s book. “In an odd way,” she wrote, “Angela's Ashes... is classically American, because we know how it turns out: Its oldest boy will eventually get back on that boat bound for the harbor of New York, bringing with him one of the millions of immigration stories that form the binding of this country's history and literature.” This sense of retrospect – that, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s play, we know how it will all turn out – is for Angela’s Ashes problematic, depending largely on the perspective the reader takes. The book ends with McCourt only just returning to America, not even a night old in the country of his birth, with no prospects and few real talents. This ending could be taken as far from certain, but considering the boy’s future, which will involve writing a book, and the book’s class as memoir, the lingering monument of success can concievably be ever-present on young Frank’s horizon. Nevertheless, if Caldwell’s notion is the redeeming value of Angela’s Ashes – that it is a tale of the American dream disguised as an Irish nightmare – the mode was McCourt’s to discover. His ability to develop a reader’s love for his characters despite his characters’ destitution and play upon his own extraordinary talents with humor in his first book, published when he was 66, is the ultimate proof that McCourt deserves every praise he has or will receive.

Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments: